


Tracker's King: Abode by Justice

by AJGhostWolf



Category: Original Work
Genre: Cowboys, Gen, Good versus Evil, Injury, Old School, Outlaws, Tracking, Western, Whump, lawmen, yeeyee
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:48:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23371189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AJGhostWolf/pseuds/AJGhostWolf
Summary: Howdy folks. I'm currently writing a book due for publishing, and decided I would post a related piece here on AO3 for my loyal followers, I'm a little hoping to get you hooked, I admit :-) And unlike most of my other work, this will contain no one else's characters, just my own. This is like a pre- or post- work to my official novel, so anyway, I'm hoping you enjoy it!





	1. Chapter 1

Alder Brandt’s horse, Washoe, swiveled his ears forward sharply and jerked his head up, nostrils flaring out. 

Alder leaned forward ever so slightly, glancing between Washoe and the line of trees the horse was honing in on. “Whoa,” he said softly, gently nudging Washoe forward and taking his rifle from the saddle boot. He quietly made sure there was a shell in the chamber and braced the butt on his thigh. His finger rested just outside the trigger guard, and every nerve went on full alert.  He scanned the area continually, watching for anything out of the ordinary. 

A couple stray branches caught his attention, wiggling _just_ too much to have been the wind. Alder moved the rifle to the crook of his arm, leveling it just a few inches above the movement. He switched the safety off. 

The .270 caliber rifle was unveiled in 1925 by Winchester as a big-game hunting gun. It had come under refinement since, of course, but it was mostly still the same gun. Spark, ignition, pressure, projectile, hit. No great change over almost a hundred years, because it didn't need it. It was no sniper rifle, but it was damned capable in almost every other way. Shell, shoot, jack, repeat. Five second process, less if you were good at doing it. 

Alder steadied Washoe, called out, "Hands up _now_!" and jerked Washoe hard to the side. 

Just as the gelding sidestepped, a bullet punched into the air where Alder's chest had just been.

Alder took short mental note of the muzzle flare and the powder smoke, stepped from the saddle as easy as could be, and sent a return shot that hit with a rewarding _thunk_. Cussing followed immediately after. 

"You sonuva _bitch_!" the voice screamed. "You ruined my fucking hand!" 

"Come out!" Alder demanded. A new bullet had been in the chamber in three seconds. "'Fore I decide to shoot you in the skull!" 

The convict, Jeremy Tate, didn't wait for long before doing as he was told, throwing his rifle toward Adler. Brandt's shot had clipped the rifle barrel, busted the bolt for the action, cut a furrow through the stock, and entered Tate's hand between his index and middle finger, ripping though it and blowing apart a good chink of his wrist before going somewhere out in the sage. Alder certainly wasn't going to look for it. He bandaged Tate's hand, put the cuffs on him, and decided that he was too damned tired to do anything but make camp. 

Adler padlocked Tate to a doug' fir and started untacking Washoe. He fished his coffee pot and cook pan out of his saddlebags and laid them next to his intended fire spot, laying his saddle and bedroll out next to it as well. He tethered Washoe in reach of food and water, and started building a fire. 

Tate watched him with a 70-30 mix of disgust and respect. "You a pretty handy man, ain'tchu?" 

Adler didn't dignify him with a response, just gave him a dead cold stare and resumed his fire-building. He'd dug out just enough of a hole and lined it with a few rocks to keep his little blaze from spreading, opened up a can of beans and pulled out his bag of coffee grounds. Boiled coffee was never as good as regular percolated coffee, but it was still caffeine. 

Tate was all kinds of pissy, but a couple warning looks from Adler and he finally shut up, helped along by the promise of a plate of beans if he did. 

Adler cooked up dinner, ate, fed Jeremy, and curled up in his bedroll to get some sleep. Tomorrow would be an even longer day than this shitty one had been. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Well it took some time in coming and it's real short, but based on the two-person interest so far I thought that was appropriate. More hits = longer chapters, when I have five open fics and three books to work on. Anyway, thanks, and enjoy!

Adler started tacking up Washoe at five forty-five, after having a few cups of coffee to start the day off right. He threw Jeremy into the saddle, tied him there, and set off walking out of the woods. He was tired, irritated, cold, and ready to collect his payment and go home. Jeremy was tired too, and more than a little uncomfortable from sleeping against a tree all night, but at least he was keeping his mouth shut. He just hunched up in the cold saddle and resigned himself to the cold and soreness. 

Frost coated the ground, and other than a few occasional chirps, the woods were silent. 

“Media coverage must be a bitch for you, huh?” Tate suddenly said. 

Adler didn’t respond, just kept plodding along. 

God he hated to walk. 

Jeremy continued anyway. “‘Cause my friends, they’d be watchin’ the news. And they’ll come for me.” 

Adler couldn’t help but scoff. “In two hundred square miles of sagebrush and pine? Sure. You got your ass lost back in here, doubt they’d fare much better.” 

Tate stopped talking. 

Adler figured they’d come a good twenty miles in at a left angle to the Paulina Highway, and to return that distance, at his rambling walk, would take all of nine hours. And just in case Tate was right, he didn’t want to come out above the wreck site. He’d be a sitting duck. So he wanted to circle around and come up on the eastern side of the “town”, slink into the ODOT yard, lock Tate safely away, and go find officer Lebedev, if he was still there. 

It was shaping up to be a long day. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Well I was surprised to see that the number of hits on this had actually doubled from my last posting, so I figured I'd give in and knuckle down for another chapter. Bit of a time jump and some unexplained things here, but I like to let my readers fill in the blanks however they want. Anyway, enjoy!

Some men didn’t have what it took to survive. Some men had too much. Adler managed somewhere in the middle usually. But he’d learned first hand when it came to an animal trying to kill a human, there was no such thing as too much. 

When the damn dog charged him, he’d met the run by grabbing its scruff and jerking it closer, jamming a thumb in its eye and hooking the rest of his fingers under the jaw. He used it as an anchor to do the same on the other side, forcing the dog’s mouth closed and yanking it closer again. 

Where he promptly bit its nose off. 

No such thing as too much. 

Alder spat the nose out and flung the dog hard into the side of a tree, hoping that being blind, scentless, and stunned would be enough. It was. 

The dog laid down and shivered and didn’t move again. 

And Adler turned to its owner. 

Blood was running down his chin, his eyes had a feral yet strangely amused light to them, and his hands were coated with eye juice, fur, and blood. 

Tate, who had set the dog on him, actually shivered at the sight, but decided his best option would now be to charge. And if Adler wasn’t going to kill him before, he decided that he was now. 

He grabbed him in a similar way to the dog, and just twisted his neck in one sharp movement. 

Tate was cooling meat before he hit the ground. 

The dog whined. 

“Sorry, pup,” Adler said after a moment. “But you’re a million ways better off.” 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My my, six hits?! That's like seven more than I expected! All jokes aside, thanks so much for the interest in this probably more benign topic, I like writing it and I like that there are people who like reading it. Anyhow, enjoy!

Adler managed to avoid anyone else that Tate might have been friends with. He’d strapped Tate’s body belly-down across the saddle, and laid the dog on top of him. She was still alive, just hurting and beaten into submission. 

The walk was long and tiring, especially because Adler had rolled his ankle in the short-lived fight and now had to hobble around on it. 

But they got to where they were going, sure enough. 

Washoe, like any sane animal, didn’t care for the smell of unwashed dead, but would have to put up with it because there wasn’t a way in hell Tate was riding in the pickup. 

Adler wrapped his body in some old tarp and threw it into the furthest front corner of the trailer, so at least Washoe could kind of stay away from it. 

He made the dog comfortable in the bed of the old pickup, bundling up a few old horse blankets and coats to make a small nest for her, and then started his usual untacking and brushing procedure, that only took him twenty minutes because he didn’t want to hang around too long. 

And so they loaded up and hit the road fast, aiming for the Prineville Sheriff’s office to collect the bounty. 

For Tate, the rapist and murderer, the price ran fifty-thousand dollars dead or alive, usually, in rural communities. Because they actually cared about their people. And didn’t coddle or suck up to criminals. 

But Adler reminded himself that he wasn’t a man of politics, he was just the bounty hunter. And he had once again gotten his man. 


	5. Day 7

It had indeed been a half-decent bounty, twenty-thousand five-hundred even. It wasn’t what he’d agreed to with the office beforehand, but he was used to the short stick and wouldn’t complain as long as they didn’t try to beat him with it. 

He just collected his money, left them the body, and drove to the nearest vet’s office to have the dog checked out. 

Noses wrinkled every time he passed someone, because he smelled of death. And he would for days, no matter how hard he scrubbed and scratched. The joys of a bloody work. 

“What in the hell happened to her?” the tech asked as she looked over the big black shepherd of some kind. 

“Me,” Adler said simply. 

When she gave him a furious look, he added, “She was sicced on me, ma’am. I wouldn’t have had anything to do with her otherwise.” 

The stink-eye faded slightly, but didn’t diminish totally. Understandable, seeing the condition of the poor pup. 

Still, no such thing as too much. Not in survival. 

The tech took her temperature, drew some blood, all the regular things, before starting to feel the pup’s nose. 

“What on earth?” she asked, looking up at Adler. 

“Her nose wasn’t connected. All I had was some superglue in my truck, or she’d have bled to death on the way in.” 

The vet winced deeply and obviously didn’t like that but couldn’t argue with it either. 

She probed and massaged and pried and everything for another twenty minutes before shooing Adler outside. He was considering walking out and leaving completely when she said, “You hurt her, you brought her, she’s going to be legally considered yours. Sitchor butt down and wait.” 

He lifted a half-offended eyebrow at that but sat and waited. 

For two hours. 

Finally he couldn’t take the pain in his ankle any more and hobbled over to the receptionist and crankily asked for the veterinarian by name. 

When she walked out, all offended looking and pissed off, he calmly said, “Look. I messed up my leg. I need to go to the doctor. I’m happy to pay for the dog. And to take her with me. But I need to go to the doctor.” 

She stood there and stared for a moment, then begrudgingly nodded. “Fine. There’s only one hospital in this town, on Combs Flat.” 

He nodded. “I passed it on my way in. I’ll be back.” And he limped out to his pickup, cussing Tate and his probably equally asshole-ish ancestors all the way. 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ah hell I like this story too much to care about the hits. For all like eight of ya that're interested, here's two new chapters! Enjoy 'em!

He just had a heavy sprain, aggravated by his walking on it for several hours after the fact. They gave him a boot and a cane, gave him a bill, and kicked him right out within two hours. So he went back to the vet. 

The tech met him at the door, looking faintly surprised that he actually came back. “She’ll never see again,” she said, an accusatory tone to her voice. “Her nose will probably be fine, but we had to amputate one of her ears and remove what was left of her eyes. Surgery was done to fix her ribs. She’ll limp the rest of her life, I think. One of her hips was severely cracked and had a piece of wood through it.” 

“I did throw her into a tree,” Adler said matter-of-factly. 

She paled. “You owe us some money, mister Brandt,” she said with a tight expression. 

He nodded and hobbled along to the desk, peeling off half of his newly-earned income to meet their price. He was a little sore about that, but wasn’t about to argue for fear the woman would jump over the counter at him and just go to town. 

They led him back to see the dog, who was laying on a table on a big dog bed. She perked up her ear at their noise and looked in their direction, obviously distressed that she was missing one and a half of five senses. 

“We didn’t fix her, and she’s in heat. You’ll need to keep her wounds dry, clean, and comfortable,” the vet said. More like ordered. “Keep her well fed and watered. She’s your responsibility now, and if I find out you end up dumping her somewhere . . . .” Her eyes plainly said that things would not end well. 

“Yes ma’am,” Adler said gruffly. 

He slowly allowed the dog to smell his hand, then gently wrapped his arms around her and picked her up. Being disabled and afraid was not fun, he knew from experience. 

The vet intervened and said, “Oh for the love of God put her down and just take the whole bed.” 

And then she watched him walk out of her office and out of the clinic, and he resisted the urge to turn around and tell about flies and vinegar. 

* * * * *

He gave the dog the passenger seat, spread a blanket over her because she was shivering, and drove east out of town, toward John Day. He only made a short stop at a Bimart to buy extra bandages for the pup and painkillers for himself. 

He could have made his trip shorter had he gone back the same way he came in through Paulina, but some of Tate’s asshole friends could be waiting. So he decided to go the longer, more scenic way. 

The dog settled in after a while, breathing deeply in sleep. She was beautiful, even all bandaged up, a deep midnight black all over and white-bellied. She was obviously very loyal and protective. 

“Dog,” Adler eventually said. “I hope you like Montana. And other shepherds. You an’ Harbin would make some purty cute puppies.” His eyes twinkled slightly. “Well, I reckon we’ll probably find out for certain if you will, here in a while.” 


End file.
